If they knew that it fuels extremism, would Americans take more decisive steps to address corruption among allies in the Muslim world? A former NPR correspondent and U.S. military adviser ruminates on this question in her new book, “Thieves of State.”

Sarah Chayes won awards for her journalism at NPR, then became an entrepreneur in Afghanistan (manufacturing soap, with a grant from Oprah Winfrey), and finally saw her work on corruption in that struggling nation usher her into the U.S. military apparatus as an adviser to officials like Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. On the verge of a breakthrough with the military brass on prosecuting cases of corruption, suddenly the U.S. changed tack, choosing instead to double down on assassinating presumed extremists rather than fighting corruption. Chayes was baffled.

Through a chain of vignettes like these, the book details a theory initially glimpsed during her time in Afghanistan, and finally made clear after subsequent reporting: The corruption was a tool of the bureaucracy. But her jaunts around the world revealed something even more disturbing, a theory that Chayes elucidates by turning back to old European writings on corruption leading up to the Protestant Reformation, and comparing these with a selective dissection of protest and resistance movements in parts of the Muslim world. Corruption, she saw, amounted to a threat to U.S. security.

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Chayes’ central premise is that structural corruption provokes resentment, which leads to revolts, protests and, in some cases, fuels extremist violence. In Afghanistan, where the U.S. has been at war, and in Egypt, where the U.S. has sponsored government tyranny, which culminated in 2011 with the nonviolent overthrow of long U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, Chayes argues that by countenancing corruption and even tacitly and actively enabling it, the U.S. is thwarting its own strategic aims, and likely helping Islamist extremists recruit legions of bodies to flesh out their ranks. She’s not the first to argue this, though she does so in an entirely unique way.

The book profiles corruption in Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Nigeria, and draws out interesting examples of official corruption leading, in one case, to the movement that became Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. She also holds up what disgruntled witnesses and ordinary observers have said in these places — in off-the-cuff remarks as well as responses to formal interviews — with a strange series of texts from Europe (and their counterparts in medieval Islamic literature) called “the mirrors of princes.” This was the genre that Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” in — a kind of targeted advice column from a kingdom’s subjects (scholars or clergy) to its monarch, or from the dying king to his successor. Their theme? Don’t do corruption.

In one example, William of Pagula wrote a frustrated book-length “mirror” to the corrupt Edward III that breaks down into grief-stricken exclamations: “O woe! O shame! O disgrace! O infamy! O affliction! O ambition! O struggle!” The list grows longer. Chayes holds this beside something Afghans said to her: “Oppressors! Tyrants! Liars! Bribe-takers! If the government administration in this country isn’t reformed, it doesn’t matter how many soldiers the Americans bring.”

This crosscutting serves to show how unusual “Thieves of State” can be. One senses she is trying to spark that infamous Muslim Reformation that Americans are always harping on, without asking whether occupation and military aid to kleptocrats have already thwarted it. But the book is also cogent and fascinating, her cause, a manifesto against corruption, animated by the idea that “acute, abusive government corruption prompts extreme responses and thus represents a mortal threat to security.”

Having worked for President Hamid Karzai’s brother, Chayes admits she only slowly came to understand how corrupt he was. Captivated at first by his eloquent political analysis and posturing, she realized eventually that his actions fell short of his words. When Karzai himself repeatedly pardoned subordinates involved in a trickle-up payoff system, Chayes finally realized one part of the picture, which was fleshed out further when she saw a CIA payoff. Finally she came to understand that the CIA was involved deeply in this corruption, and so arrests of druglords or other lawbreakers would be reversed not just by Afghans but also by entrenched American corruption networks. But then she leaps to another country.

Vignettes from Afghanistan are the most interesting parts of “Thieves of State.” Rather than leap away to try to prove a pattern that cannot really be proved across so few countries with so little data, one wonders if the book ought to stay in Afghanistan, where Chayes’ hunches are most informed.

The contradiction in the book is that if the military knew that corruption was a “force multiplier for the enemy,” and it chose not to heed her recommendations when she made them in person, why would they heed those recommendations now? Chayes is likewise muted on the key paradox of corruption: Getting the U.S. to prosecute corrupt Afghans skips the question President Obama failed to answer by choosing to look forward, not backward. Can an occupying power possibly resist corruption?

If given her role in think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment, Chayes is worried about her standing with former colleagues, she could certainly have channeled numerous recent texts on these matters. James Risen’s 2014 “Pay Any Price” details payola schemes using military subcontractors like KBR; cash shipments of billions of dollars that were never accounted for; and even ordinary American soldiers bringing home bribe money meant to purchase Afghan support, laundering it through numerous banks to keep the deposits low. Anand Gopal’s “No Good Men Among the Living” recounts how the CIA funded the corrupt mujahedeen directly, creating the reaction that became the Taliban. None of this is to suggest that “Thieves of State” is wrong in wishing to end corruption over there, just that it presents the corruption as emanating from the wrong source. If U.S. officials with the blackest of budgets put Karzai in power in the first place, as Gopal has shown, how they themselves can be made to rein him in is a puzzle that gets into accountability not over there but over here.

Joel Whitney is the co-founder and editor at large of the online magazine Guernica. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com

Thieves of State

Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

By Sarah Chayes

(Norton; 262 pages; $26.95)

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